Visa, MasterCard, and...........IndiaPay

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), with the support of Reserve Bank of India is actively engaged in the development of IndiaPay, a payment processing platform, which is expected to be up within the next 18-24 months. This is going to give Visa and MasterCard an unusual competition from India. Once launched, IndiaPay is going to affect the dominance of Visa and Mastercard, at the same time, bringing down transaction charges for the banks. Every time a cardholder uses credit or debit card, banks have to pay fees to Visa and MasterCard for facilitating the processing of such transactions. With the increasing use of plastic money, banks will be more than happy to give a thumbs-up to this platform, which will obviously be quoting a much lower transaction charge. The NPCI is promoted by major Indian banks including ICICI Bank, State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, Punjab National Bank, as well as global banks like Citibank and HSBC. Indeed another INDIAN development story.